I'm just wondering how much you were hurt by the ellipsis built-in. After all, the ellipsis built-in was (at least for many years) of absolutely no use to anyone other than those using certain libraries for scientific computing. The rest of us had to put up with the pain of having yet one more line in the documentation. Frankly, for me it didn't hurt much.

As a general rule, "Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules", but like everything in Zen it is a balance. If a very large community of Python users (and the scientific users ARE a large and important subset of Python users) say they would benefit significantly from this change, then perhaps this is the exception -- especially since the "cost" (in additional complexity) is fairly small.